Top 500 supercomputers: Welcome to the petaflop generation

Welcome to the petaflop generation. That was the message today as the new most powerful supercomputer in the world IBM’s $100,000 million Roadrunner system installed at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory was officially named the most powerful and energy efficient supercomputer in the world.

Take a closer look at IBM’s Roadrunner, the world’s fastest supercomputerRounding out the top five positions, all of which are in the US are the new IBM BlueGene/P (450.3 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, the new Sun SunBlade x6420 “Ranger” system (326 teraflop/s) at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas – Austin, and the upgraded Cray XT4 “Jaguar” (205 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The No. 6 system is the top system outside the US, installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich. It is an IBM BlueGene/P system and was measured at 180 Tflop/s. The No. 7 system is installed at a new center, the New Mexico Computing Applications Center in Rio Rancho, NM. It is built by SGI and based on the Altix ICE 8200 model. It was measured at 133.2 Tflop/s. The Computational Research Laboratories, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd. in Pune, India, installed a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system. They integrated this system with their own routing technology and achieved a performance of 132.8 Tflop/s which was sufficient for No. 8, the survey noted. The No. 9 system is a new BlueGene/P system installed at the Institut du Développement et des Ressources en Informatique Scientifique (IDRIS) in France, which was measured at 112.5 Tflop/s. The last new system in the TOP10 – at No. 10 – is also an SGI Altix ICE 8200 system. It is the biggest system installed at an industrial customer, Total Exploration Production. It was ranked based on a Linpack performance of 106.1 Tflop/s, according to TOP500.

Among all systems, Intel continues to grow, with Intel processors now found in 75% of the TOP500 supercomputers, up from 70.8 % of the 30th list released last November. The US leads the world in supercomputer systems with 257 of the top 500.

The European share (184 systems – up from 149) is still rising and is again larger then the Asian share (48 – down from 58 systems). Dominant countries in Asia are Japan with 22 systems (up from 20), China with 12 systems (up from 10), India with 6 systems (down from 9), and Taiwan with 3 (down from 11), according to the survey. In Europe, UK remains the No. 1 with 53 systems (48 six months ago). Germany improved but is still in the No. 2 spot with 46 systems (31 six months ago), the survey found.

The group notes a number of other features from the survey:

* Quad-core processor based systems have taken over the TOP500 quite rapidly. Already 283 systems are using them. Two hundred three systems are using dual-core processors, only eleven systems still use single core processors, and three systems use IBM’s advanced Sony PlayStation 3 processor with 9 cores.

* The top industrial customer, at No. 10, is the French oil company: Total Exploration Production.

* IBM held on to its lead in systems with 210 systems (42%) over Hewlett Packard with 183 systems (36.6%). IBM had 232 systems (46.4%) six months ago, compared to HP with 166 systems (33.2%).

* IBM remains the clear leader in the TOP500 list in performance with 48 percent of installed total performance (up from 45), compared to HP with 22.4% (down from 23.9). In the system category Dell, SGI and Cray follow with 5.4 , 4.4 and 3.2 % respectively.

* The last system on the list would have been listed at position 200 in the previous TOP500 just six months ago. This is the largest turnover rate in the 16-year history of the TOP500 project.

With this survey, its 31st since 1993, the TOP500 began measuring computer efficiency as well. The TOP500 most energy efficient supercomputers are: